What are the EU’s Partnerships with forested countries?
When she became President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen said that the under her mandate, the Commission would be “geopolitical”.
This meant that the European Union's (EU's) strategic priorities for a green, digital and fair Europe should be coupled with international partnerships. "My mission is to work strategically and effectively with international partners to build the world we want to live in tomorrow. A world that is green, digital and fair, with equal opportunity for all," said the Commissioner for International Partnerships.
Over the years, and particularly since 2019, the EU has developed a wide range of partnerships that are relevant to forests, such as “forest partnerships”, cooperation measures and multistakeholder dialogues to support compliance with the new EU deforestation regulation (EUDR) as well as coordinated “Team Europe Initiatives” and “strategic partnerships” to work on critical raw material.
These partnerships have very different aims. But to work, they must be well developed.
What Fern and our partners work on
We create space for civil society, including Indigenous Peoples, local communities, ethnic minorities and smallholders, to be heard in EU policy debates.
Fern campaigns to ensure that international EU partnerships with forested countries incentivise efforts to tackle deforestation’s root causes, which include weak forest governance and unclear land tenure.
Such partnerships should contain an unbreakable commitment to include those who are so often marginalised in decision-making processes, but whose voices are nevertheless crucial to their success - including civil society organisations, Indigenous groups and smallholders.
Yet supporting these groups to shape policy is just one part of the jigsaw: it is also vital that the negotiation and implementation processes are transparent, and that changes to the forests are independently monitored.
What has been achieved so far?
The EU has a commendable history of using access to its markets as a carrot to tackle global environmental challenges, especially through its ground-breaking Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan.
Fern has worked on FLEGT for two decades – and specifically on Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with forested countries. VPAs are timber trade deals which require inclusive dialogue to strengthen forest laws and governance in timber producing countries. The EU’s future partnerships with forested countries should build upon the many benefits that VPAs have brought, ensuring multistakeholder dialogue and prioritising marginalised communities’ input.
What are the next steps?
Fern and our partners want to improve the EU’s partnerships with forested countries, and the way these partnerships are monitored (and enforced through EU and national legislation) once they are up and running.
The EUDR has the potential to drastically reduce the role that EU consumption plays in driving deforestation and violating communities’ tenure rights.
But to really help halt deforestation, the EU must develop meaningful partnership agreements with producer countries that include those who are directly impacted.
The EU is currently trying to secure its supply of Critical Raw Materials to achieve a green transition.
To support this, the EU is developing Strategic Partnerships with resource-rich countries, many of whom are also highly forested.
The EU’s Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) timber trade deals with forested countries are a crucial component of the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan.
The VPA model has improved forest conditions, governance, and local communities’ rights, but innovations and revisions are needed to keep helping tackling legal deforestation.
